I’m not a huge fan of YouTube videos, but this series of 5 episodes by Tom Davis caught my attention and kept me glued to the screen for a couple of hours. The challenge Tom selected was to cross an entire country, Wales, in a straight line. The line was carefully selected on Google Earth trying to minimize encounters with farmers, avoiding crossing villages and the steepest mountains. Watching the videos I realized that, as a child, I had the same dream. I was not dreaming about crossing Wales, but crossing the village where I grew up along a straight line.
Wales is the perfect country for this kind of challenges: it has no major mountains, and it is mostly covered by pastures and forests. Also I believe it is easy to draw a line that crosses the entire country without intersecting any major city or town.
Tom describes his adventure as “33 miles of mountains, farmland, lakes, rivers, and forests, and just the right amount of human activity and natural hazards to ensure regular doses of paranoia and pain.”
Franco Folini 